Google Slams Viacom For Secret YouTube Uploads

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Reuters: "Google, Inc. accused Viacom, Inc. of secretly uploading its videos to YouTube even as the media conglomerate publicly denounced the online video site for copyright infringement, according to court documents made public on Thursday." As "statements from the corporate counsel's office" go, this post on the YouTube blog is pretty hot reading.

Comments

Re:Viacom - the verb

[AK Marc]

Since this was a secret astroturf project, Viacom had to have their regular DMCA people prowl youtube to remove the clips.

If someone uploaded them with Viacom permission, then the copyright is owned by Google (or something close to that, I haven't read the TOS for YouTube). If they demanded them taken down, then they broke the law. They, in bad faith, requested the take down of something they know they didn't have the right to take down.

It doesn't matter if the right hand didn't know what the left was doing, Viacom is a single legal entity, and they gave permission, transferred rights to Google, then hit them with a legal action full of false claims.

If this was some adult using MySpace to abuse a minor, they'd have filed hacking charges against them. But because it was a corporation, there will be some bitching and moaning, and not much else.